“Dutch” Boyd Looking for a Backer

The brightest stars burn out faster and Russ “Dutch” Boyd’s story reminds many of Stu Ungar’s tragic poker legend. A child prodigy who graduated from law school at 18 and won his first WSOP bracelet at 26, Dutch Boyd has lifetime live winnings of over $1,300,000 – yet in his blog he says is looking for a sponsor to buy him into a $15,000 event.

Notorious Dutch Boyd is a household name in the poker circuit: from his controversial bankruptcy with PokerSpot.com to his celebrated “Crew” of hot young poker players, not to forget his on-screen quip to Mike Matusow about drinking urine and his self publicized mental illness.

A few days ago Boyd posted an entry in his blog titled “Hungry Horse ISO Stable.” In it the volatile player offers himself as a hired poker hand in exchange for backing into the Bellagio Cup IV $15,000 Main Event, claiming that his current backers – Team SMD, owned by Eric “Sheets” Haber and Cliff “JohnnyBax” Josephy – have too many players in their hands and are no longer supporting him as well as they used to. These are the key statements from the blog:

“It’s not really a secret that I play for Sheets and Bax. I was their second guy they started backing… now they have close to 70 horses. Because of logistics and bad planning, I didn’t get the 10k to play the main event at the World Series of Poker. And because of my bad series, they aren’t going to put me into the 15k Bellagio.”

“If you are interested and can get me the money by tomorrow at noon, I’ll be your loyal horse. I’ll send other great players to you to back if you’re into having multiple horses. I’m loyal and have never ripped them off… I’ve always paid what I’m supposed to and require very little maintenance.”

Boyd also claimed that he has made his former backers over $500,000 since the 2006 WSOP.

A check of the chip counts after the Bellagio Cup IV $15,000 Main Event was over does not show Boyd’s name, which probably means that he unfortunately did not get his $15,000 in time. On the other hand, it also means that he is probably still available for backing, which could be interesting to anyone who’s thinking of starting their own “stable.”

On a separate note, last year Dutch declared in an interview that he had designs on this year’s Cardplayer’s Player of the Year award, and that he had made bets on it: “I made a $5,000 prop bet with Jeff Madsen that I will finish ahead of him in the 2008 POY race. I have another $5,000 bet with Justin Bonomo that I will be ahead of him. The plan is to rack up POY points.” At the time of writing he seems to have broken even: Bonomo ranks in 14th place, Boyd is number 332 and Madsen comes a very distant third at 1804.